Homeric and Hesiodic Society

Whatever, may be the dates of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Hesiodic poems, these works all depict one same society, whose economic organization is marked by special features of its own. It is not easy to indicate the beginning of the period in which this society lived or to determine the circumstances in which it succeeded the society of the Ægean age, but it is at least certain that it is earlier than either the settlement of the Dorians in the Peloponnese or the expansion of the Greeks over the Mediterranean. Achæans still occupy the valleys of the Eurotas, Pamisos, and Alpheios, the mountains of Arcadia, the plains of Elis, and the peninsulas of Argolis. Crete, Rhodes, and some islands of the southern Ægean—Nisyros, Carpathos, Cos—have come into the Hellenic domain, ¹ but the peoples dwelling in Thrace and on the western coasts of Asia Minor are included in the Iliad among the allies of the Trojans. ² In the Odyssey, Alcinoos tells Odysseus that Eubœa is the furthest of the lands known to the Phæacians. ³ It is true that Hesiod, in his Works and Days, relates that his father, after vainly seeking his fortune at Cyme in Æolis, took ship and settled in the small Bœotian town of Ascra. ⁴ Even if we admit that the so-called Æolian colonization had by that time reached the coast of Asia Minor, we know that, according to Greek tradition, that settlement was earlier than the great movement of the Ionians. ⁵ As for the countries of the West, Trinacria, that is Sicily, was still unknown to Greek mariners, and they regarded Italy as the abode of divine beings like Circe. Homeric and Hesiodic society, then, had for its geographical setting Greece Proper, and for its chronological setting the period extending from the end of the Ægean age to the great migrations by land and sea which gave the Hellenic world its final shape, constitution, and extent.